Filibuster in a dream: what does it mean?
Talking until the time runs out, which defeats a proposal without ever voting against it.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the avoidance. The thing is never opposed, only outlasted, and he would ask what the dreamer defeated by refusing to reach.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the content stops mattering. Members have read cookbooks and phone directories, so the words are irrelevant and only the clock is real.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Delay and obstruction appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being prevented from finishing among common situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Filibustero is a freebooter or pirate, so the parliamentary tactic is named after buccaneers, on the reasoning that it is a kind of hijacking.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Members have read out cookbooks and phone books, because the words do not matter and only the clock is real.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Defeating something by outlasting it rather than opposing it.
What are the genre conventions?
A speech going into its ninth hour.
How to subvert it
Write the filibuster that persuades.
Try this
Two hundred words about winning by never letting a vote happen.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.